The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [22]
He gave the door a tug, and it opened silently.
He stepped inside and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. He looked for something to prop the door open for light and found a plastic garbage can. He shoved it into the doorway and turned back to the foyer.
He expected a ransacked, vandalized shell of a building. He expected something that looked the way he felt.
As his pupils expanded in the darkness, he put his hand into his pocket and rested it on the pistol.
The hallway was clean. No broken glass. No scattered papers or books. No signs of violence.
He took a deep breath as he read the sign on the entrance wall: WELCOME TO KUIGPAK ELITNAURVIK! HOME OF THE WOLVERINES.
He took another deep breath. The air in his nostrils didn’t smell like death. It smelled like a school.
THE ALASKA COMMERCIAL COMPANY STORE made up the town centre of Bethel, but he only guessed this by the twenty half-wrecked taxis and, oddly, one Hummer stretch limo idling in the pothole-laden parking lot. Anna went for a walk on the tundra with some other teachers, and so he figured he’d get ready for their morning flight into the village. On the advice of several seasoned village teachers, he popped into the city’s main grocery store to stock up on a few fresh vegetables and other necessities just in case it took a week or two for their boxes of canned goods to arrive in the mail.
“It’s always good to have too much food,” a balding, middle-aged principal said when Anna asked, during one of the in-service Q&A sessions, if there had ever been a food shortage. The two supply sources, by barge for only a few months in the summer and by air year-round weather permitting, seemed inadequate, so Anna’s question was fair.
Lucy, also on the panel, said that in Yup’ik history there had been several famines, and in bad fish years, when the salmon didn’t return, bad things had happened and people took extreme measures to survive.
With the session’s dialogue replaying in his mind, he entered the store half expecting a warehouse-style market, a place for people from the surrounding villages to come and load up on bare necessities. Instead, he entered what appeared to be a modern one-stop shopping centre. At first glance, the place looked like a Wal-Mart of sorts, with everything from vegetables to full-size ATVs all stuffed into one building. The first major difference he noticed from any other store he’d ever been in was the prices.
$7.99 for a small bag of potato chips.
$8.99 for a gallon of milk.
$13.99 for a gallon of orange juice.
“Holy shit,” he whispered to himself as he stood in front of small display of semi-fresh fruits and vegetables.
Cucumbers $6.99—each.
He reached out and touched a watermelon as big as a volleyball. The red and white sign beside it read:
AC VALUE PRICES
WATERMELON $12.99 PER LB.
He found himself wondering how anyone could afford to eat.
After ten minutes of idle walking, he grabbed a grocery cart and started meandering through the aisles. He wasn’t shopping for specials. Just the basics. Just enough to get them by until their boxes arrived.
As he shopped he smiled at those who passed him. He couldn’t get over the diversity of the town. For lunch they’d dined at Demitri’s, and he ate one of the best gyros he’d ever eaten, the night before the tastiest Mongolian beef he’d ever had, and by the next night he was going to be one of three white men living in a Yup’ik village in the middle of nowhere with almost nothing other than canned or frozen food to eat.
He stopped at an extensive Asian section and just stood staring at the selection in amazement. The shelves carried cans and jars labelled in Japanese, Chinese, and Thai. Nothing about this place called Bethel made sense. He picked up a bottle of fish sauce and wondered what Yup’ik cuisine tasted like. If it was anything like Thai or Chinese or Indian or Vietnamese, he was going to love it.
“Excuse me. You’re a new teacher?